Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Mauritius said on March 5 it was considering legal redress to force the United Kingdom to hand back the Chagos islands. Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam said London was delaying ratification of the deal that would see the territory, home to a strategically important naval and bomber base, revert to Port Louis.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been trying to complete a handover deal that would see Britain pay the Indian Ocean island £3.4 billion over a century to secure continued use of the crucial military base on Diego Garcia for at least 99 years.
US President Donald Trump paused his plans to give up sovereignty of the island. He argued that Starmer was “making a big mistake” with a “tenuous, at best” 99-year lease.
That has left a significant hole in Mauritius’ budget. Ramgoolam told a local website he is in talks with law firms to explore a fightback.
The British government devised the deal in order to secure the joint US-UK base because it feared losing the old colonial outpost in legal disputes with Mauritius.
Starmer granted the US permission to strike Iranian missile stores from Diego Garcia after initial hesitation. The delay led Trump to criticize his ally repeatedly.
The islands have been under British control since 1814. Britain evicted as many as 2,000 people from the islands in the 1960s and 1970s so the US military could build the Diego Garcia base.
Rightful owners
The United Nations has opposed the deal saying the islands should return to the Chagossians whom it considers the rightful owners of the land, and not Port Louis.
The UN says the agreement explicitly prevents Chagossians from returning to their ancestral homelands on Diego Garcia. It says the agreement also does not formally acknowledge past injustices, provide full reparation for harms, or allow the islands to preserve their distinct cultural heritage.
